Six Months
by Aubrey Black
Summary: A meeting in a diner after six months apart.
1. Default Chapter

Author's Note:  
  
This is a story I began to write in early 1999. I've never really been happy with it, hence the fact that it hasn't gone any further than it has. However, I think it still has some merits, so I'm putting it up here for your perusal. I think my problem with it is that it's just a little to romance novel for my taste. All the same, enjoy. Perhaps one day I'll work out where it's going and finish it.   
  
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Six Months  
  
Walking into the small diner, Dana Scully felt overwhelmed. Early morning light flooded the warm, yellow room, falling on the white linoleum floor, almost too bright for her sickness-weakened eyes. For a moment she wanted more than anything to turn around and walk straight out again, but she knew she wouldn't. She had decided to face this, the demon which had haunted her for six long months, and face it she would. She was always the strong partner, the one in control, and it was that face she would now present, no matter what the next few hours might bring. She knew she would walk out of here with her head held high. She would not have her world fall to pieces, her last fragile hopes thrown away like so many leaves on the wind, not in a roadside diner. Not here, not today.  
  
Moving from the doorway, Scully slipped quietly through the rows of tables and booths, her eyes darting from one pale face to the next, searching them. She saw no one she recognised. Manoevering herself into a booth near the back of the diner, her cotton slacks whispered on the cracked red vinyl as she settled down to wait, eyes trained on the door.   
  
She hoped he wouldn't be too long. She didn't have any idea how this meeting would go, and a long wait would just make her more nervous. It wasn't fair of him, to call her out of the blue like this, after six months of nothing. Nothing! Not a call, not a letter to say where he was or how he was doing. Scully shook her head, almost imperceptibly, as she told herself again that she was still angry at him for this. That she had not forgiven him.  
  
Pursing her lips and glancing at her watch, however, Scully knew that she had not come here out of anger, or indeed out of any sense of curiosity. She had, she reluctantly admitted to herself, come here today, to this nowhere diner thirty miles out of town, because she missed him. Desperately. She missed everything about him, his wild theories, his dry sense of humor, the way he'd push his glasses back on his forehead when he was deep in thought in the middle of working on an important report, and then not be able to find them again.   
  
But most of all, she missed having a partner, a foil, a better half - or, more often that not, a worse half. She smiled to herself, in spite of her mood. She missed his wild speculation against her scientific reserve, his unpredictability, emotion to reason, his heart to her mind. She missed *him*.  
  
And yet, here she was, nearly six months to the day of his sudden disappearance, not a word since, waiting for him to arrive. Was it any wonder she felt nervous? She had realised long ago that her first, burning anger at his leaving her so suddenly had all but evaporated, leaving in its place only a low, smouldering ache. Over the past six months it had settled uneasily in her stomach and begun to eat away at it like acid. It was an ache that, no matter how much time passed, Scully had a feeling would never quite leave her. That ache, and until the day before yesterday, a mortal fear that something had happened to him - a fear that he was gone, disappeared without a trace - that she would never see him again. The regret she felt when she realised that if this were the case, she would never have a chance to say goodbye, or to fight it, this regret was overwhelming. And so Scully had found herself grieving, in a way, for a man who was just as likely still alive.  
  
As it had turned out, he was. The nagging voice in the back of her mind that for six months had been warning her not to give up all hope had been right. The letter arrived two days ago, written in that unmistakable scrawl, asking her to meet him here, at this time, on this day. Just a few lines, written, she assumed, in a tearing hurry, giving no clue as to why, to where he had been or what she could expect to find when she met him. But she could feel the underlying sentiment, the emotion behind the bare words, the unspoken need to see her, to talk to her. But still, Dana Scully was afraid of what she might find.  
  
The ringing of the small brass bell above the door interrupted her thoughts. Scully had always hated those things, ever since she was a kid, where a similar bell hung above the door at the entrance to the school cafeteria. As a shy, insecure schoolgirl it seemed that everyone was watching her as she walked through that door, watching and judging her. Those bells made it impossible to enter a room inconspicuously, jangling out their warning, announcing your arrival to everyone.   
  
This time, the bell tolled for Mulder, her partner, her best friend, from whom she had not heard for half a year.  
  
Scully saw him, silhouetted, vulnerable in the doorway, before he saw her, tucked away in her little corner of the diner. The sun had shifted, and her booth lay mostly in shadow. Glad of this fact, she used the few moments of anonymity afforded her to take a closer look at Mulder and see how the interceding months had treated him.   
  
He was thinner, she noted. His hair longer, disheveled, as if under pressure he had run his hands through it. To Scully's amusement, he did exactly this now, scanning the diner just as she had done earlier, searching for a familiar face in the small early morning crowd. His blue jeans and woolen sweater were worn, as were the boots on his feet but Scully could not suppress the warm rush of excitement that welled up in her as she looked at him. Even thinner, he was as attractive as ever; his face, although slightly gaunt still bore that distinctive look of pride, power. The hazel eyes still betrayed the complex depths of a man tortured most of his adult life by undying ghosts of the past.  
  
As he walked toward the booth he saw her, a small smile playing about his lips. Scully smiled back, unsure, hid her twining hands in her lap - out of sight where they wouldn't betray her. She knew that if she laid them prone on the table they would shake uncontrollably. Head still angled down, Scully looked up through her lashes, suddenly shy. He stood over her, a towering presence next to her diminutive form, and yet somehow diminished himself.  
  
Something wasn't right, Scully thought, as her partner - ex-partner, she chided herself - folded himself effortlessly into the seat opposite her. Those eyes, those deep, unfathomable eyes, they had lost their gleam, the lively sparkle which she had learned to look for even in the darkest times. Mulder's eyes were dark, clouded, and sadder than she had ever seen them before.  
  
Scully continued to look down as her partner stared at her, scrutinising her, drinking his fill of the friend he had not seen for long months. It seemed an eternity to him, especially when he considered that his exile was self-imposed. So this moment, the first time in so many months, he etched her deep on his memory. She looked so striking, he thought, with the early morning sun turning her auburn hair to copper fire, that he never wanted to forget. Even if he had to go away again he would remember her as she was now, the way she lit up the dingy surroundings with her very presence.  
  
Scully continued to stare at her hands, not trusting herself to look up, fearing that if she did the tears she had conquered the week after Mulder left would finally escape her. She had no idea how to begin.   
  
In the end, she said the only thing she could.   
  
"Mulder…" 


	2. 2

As Scully finally looked up, Mulder held up his hand, silencing her. His attention seemed to catch on it as he did. He drew both his hands up until they were between them, palms facing upward, towards the diner's cracked and peeling ceiling. Staring at his hands he spoke. Whether more to himself or to Scully, neither of them knew.  
  
"Do you see these hands?" He began, looking away, his voice weary. "When I started work at the Bureau, these were the hands of a young man - just a boy, really, a stupid, naive boy, who knew nothing of life, although he thought he did. But look at them now. Look... at what I've become."   
  
Sensing the tension in his voice, Scully watched, intrigued and concerned as her   
  
partner clenched his fists. He squeezed so hard his knuckles whitened and she could see the veins outlined pale on his wrists. Again he drew his hands up, burying his strongly tanned face in them, hiding himself from the woman he shared the booth, and until recently, his life with.   
  
Scully sat rigid, watched her partner helplessly as he went through a private agony. Her own anguish drained away, forgotten as she realised that behind his hands, Mulder was crying.   
  
Reaching out, she clasped Mulder's hands between her own and drew them to the table, away from his face. Their two pairs of eyes stayed fixed on their entwined hands, neither able to look the other in the eye just yet, neither knowing what they might find if they did. Scully gently stroked his clenched fists and watched as they opened, like a fern frond unfurling in the sun Mulder, you just keep unfolding like a flower. There was a row of tiny half-moons etched on his palms where his fingernails had dug in. In two places he had drawn blood, so tight had been his grip. Scully wiped the drops away with her fingers and took his trembling hands in hers.   
  
Only then was she able to look up at her partner's face.  
  
His eyes were still downturned, fixed on their interlocked fingers. What went on behind the deep hazel eyes at that moment, only he knew. He lifted his head, his brown hair falling unnoticed in his eyes, to meet Scully's gaze. He opened his mouth to speak but it was her turn to silence him with a look he knew so well, had missed so keenly, a look which warned him that if he   
  
spoke now there would be hell to pay. So Mulder kept silent, holding onto her and blinking rapidly, a smile forming even as the tears dried on his cheeks.  
  
"I've missed you," Scully said, breaking the heavy silence that lay between them. She squeezed Mulder's hands, smiled as he returned the gentle pressure. "I don't know where you've been and I don't know why you left me, but I've missed you. And I'm glad - more glad than I think I can say - that you've come back to me, Mulder." Scully looked down at her hands again, thinking how sentimental she must sound to him.   
  
Watching as a faint blush stole over his partner's pale cheeks, Mulder's smile grew. "I've missed you, too, Scully," he said in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible. "You have no idea how I've missed you." 


End file.
